Untitled

116 Chapter 2
to be blood relatives. They were released from excommunication.
The investigation seems to have continued, and we do not know
the outcome.
Consanguinity cases do not in themselves show that indissolubility
was taken lightly. It they result from the initiative of local
church authorities, rather than the husband, they attest only to zeal
for the consanguinity rules. The large number of indissolubility
cases from the Southern Burgundian Netherlands can be and have
been explained in this way. Though they do not conform to the
general pattern described by Donahue, they do not resemble the
twelfth-century pattern of easy annulments either: all the indications
are that the couples wanted to stay married and that the local
church’s agenda was to enforce the ‘forbidden degrees’ legislation
of 1215.
The ‘easy annulments’ theory works well for the long century before
Lateran IV in 1215, but after that date it is a historians’ myth
which modern scholarship has dispelled. This needs to be said with
some emphasis, for even so fine a historian as Robert Bartlett, in a
recent standard work which goes up to 1225, suggests that ‘aristocrats
were adept at using the rules of consanguinity to get something
like divorce on demand’, without noting the transformation of the
situation near the end of this period.
The meaning of ‘pre-contract’ cases
Here an objection could be raised. In England at least, among
the commonest sorts of case in later medieval church courts were
‘pre-contract’ cases, where a marriage was challenged by someone
claiming a prior marriage to one of the partners. Behind such cases
might lie an earlier clandestine marriage. If a man and a woman
contracted a marriage by simple consent, without having banns
read first, it was a sin but valid. If the court believed in the earlier
marriage, the later one was dissolved. Did not pre-contract cases
make a mockery of indissolubility? If so, that undermines the thesis
that symbolism eventually brought about a transformation of
marriage practice.
M. Vleeschouwers-Van Melkebeek, ‘Incestuous Marriages: Formal Rules and
Social Practice in the Southern Burgundian Netherlands’, in I. Davis, M. M •uller,
and S. Rees Jones (eds.), Love, Marriage, and Family Ties in the Later Middle Ages
(International Medieval Research, 11; Turnhout, 2003), 77–95.
R. Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075–1225 (Oxford,
2000), 558. The examples he gives are all pre-1215.